There’s only one true dandy per country per century

Therefore one should always know where one is, to effect either perpetuation or violent cancellation.

Anecdotes of a Story

Summer, 1939. Anaïs Nin writes from Saint-Tropez:

In one of the nightclubs they would put out all the lights and announce: “This is the quart d’heure of passion. You may kiss but you must not be caught at it.” The lights would suddenly go on again, and many were caught.

No wonder that the Golden Age detective story writers loved this setting, at once glamorous and domestic. The lights go on, couples leave for the dance floor, and the immobile ecstasy of the quarter-hour resolves itself into the dramatic unveiling of a corpse. There is a violence here completely unlike the fishing out of a body from the library fireplace of some Wiltshire country house. It is perhaps only comparable to a murder on stage. Polonius.

Recalling those stories, I deplore the temporal laxity of those clubbers. (“Nothing is more serious than children at play.”.) Set a stopwatch! But the point is to be caught. The other point is that such clubs are familiar, beginning to wear, promising more consolation (Colette’s “creature comforts” for expanding-but-not-fading dames) than adventure, where people get drunk exactly to the point where attraction reaches the peak and esteem suffers no diminution – “the wine glasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson” – and then, the sound of a body falling from heaven. The front doors are thrown open. Enter Poirot.

But suppose not?

This possibility is hinted at by a graduate student in a write-in column of the New York Times. The relevant passages are:

“I bought a bottle of Larceny bourbon the night before in preparation and had consumed half before he arrived. I had never had sober sex with a new partner, and I wasn’t about to start with a guy I barely knew.

I know many people are adept at this sleeping-with-strangers thing. I have never known how to do this. I have never known how to go from, “So what’s your name?” to having you in my bed or me in your bed or us in the back of a car in the parking lot of a Target.”

This admission summoned forth a surprising amount of censure in the comments page. A particularly fine sample of prudish punctilio runs thus: “That last encounter she describes has as much to do with love as the time my beagle detected that the neighbor’s cocker spaniel was in heat.” (The astringency makes one wonder whether it was jealousy talking.) I smell the air freshener scented solicitude at this young person losing her receptivity to the formerly standard process of normative relationships. It suffices to mention its affinity to another kind of fear, involving toothbrushes and the fitness to be married.

Incidentally, the interpretation of Pellegrina in the letters of Henry Miller is astonishing. (“There is a certain enchantment in the style, but every now and then the skin breaks and a broom handle shoves through.” The image is clever – I suppose Dinesen would have liked it, as a party trick – but I don’t suppose “Henry”‘s French was too fine.) Anaïs’s reply is equally astonishing: “Venusian.” “The strength of the body is not infinite.” A world apart from Hannah Arendt’s summing-up in Men in Dark Times: “Life may contain the “essence” (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the “elixir”; and eventually you may even be privileged to “make” something out of it, “to compound the story.” But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat it as such it will only play its tricks on you.”

Although now I remember how, in her last years, due to spinal syphilis, Dinesen could not stand up for days at a time, dictating prone on the floor, and when she could walk she must be dressed in particular custom-made gowns. Maybe Anaïs, guessing in the dark (and trying to be agreeable), shot rather close to the mark.

Geographic Determinism

While they were part of East Germany during the cold war, Saxons felt especially isolated because, far from the iron curtain, they could rarely receive West German television signals. Other East Germans called the region “the valley of the clueless”.

Says – who else? – the Economist.

Seventh Grade

Maria Russo reviews Chelsea Clinton’s It’s Your World in the NYT:

It’s clear that she indeed wrote it herself, all 400 or so earnest, methodically compiled pages. The book is meant to help kids feel empowered and get involved in making change in the world, and at that length, it’s indeed a mini-behemoth in a genre of children’s books that don’t involve magic and are not written by the likes of J.K. Rowling or Rick Riordan. Clinton surveys pretty much every problem known to humankind — including poverty, global warming, obesity, gender inequality and cancer. She breaks it all down with statistics, adds a little historical context and offers a look at some solutions, both the governmental kind and the things individuals can do to make a difference.

Where she succeeds is in making even the knottiest issues seem accessible to a bright seventh grader. In fact, she writes in a style that would seem perfectly at home in a stack of middle-school term papers. (“In my lifetime, a number of countries across the world granted women the right to vote for the first time. Having the right to vote is often only a first step. Being able to safely exercise that right is often harder, even dangerous for some women … and men alike. In many countries where women are denied a meaningful right to vote, men are too. To be clear, that shared inequality and lack of rights is nothing to celebrate.”)

Having double-checked that Chelsea did receive a less prestigious education than mine, I am left with two observations. One, in Lauren Rivera’s study of high-status entrance level job recruitment, Pedigree (not Patrick Modiano’s memoir of the same title) – the senior consultants, bankers, and (horror) lawyers quoted there exhibit the vocabulary of a middle-schooler and the speech pattern of a circus chipmunk. Two, the Huffington Post reports OKCupid’s finding that Brown students “had some of the “highest quality messages” with an average of 236 words written at a 7th grade reading level.”

Note the involuntary regression to the number seven.

“Soft” and “Hard”

So this is where Mary McCarthy got the phrase “The Stones of Florence” from…

Ernst Gombrich in The Preference for the Primitive:

In [Ruskin’s] famous chapter [in The Stones of Venice] on “The Nature of Gothic” (vol. X, p.180)… he celebrates the independence of the medieval mason and even his “savageness” (vol. X, p.184), which he so vastly prefers to the dead perfectionism of Renaissance buildings. We are reminded of the distinction made by Lovejoy and Boas between “soft” and “hard” primitivism. If Lindsay’s vision of the Paradise of medieval innocence was soft to a fault, Ruskin dreamt of robust savages who nevertheless remained untouched by pride, for the vicarious experience he looked for in the art of the past was also that of humility. It was for this reason that he also turned against the interpretation of medieval art that had been popularized by the Romantics. He came out into the open in a footnote of volume II of Modern Painters: “The art which, since the writings of RIo and Lord Lindsay is especially known as “Christian”, erred by pride in its denial of the animal nature of man; – and, in connection with all monkish and fanatical forms of religion, by looking always to another world instead of this. It wasted its strength in visions, and was therefore swept away, notwithstanding all its good and glory, by the strong truth of the naturalist art of the sixteenth century. But that naturalist art erred on the other side; denied at last the spiritual nature of man, and perished in corruption” (vol. VII, p.264).

This was surely written after Ruskin had put away his “evangelical beliefs… to be debated no more” on that memorable day in front of Paolo Veronese’s painting in the gallery of Turin. so movingly described in his Praeterita (vol. III, pp.460-1). His recognition of the “animal nature of man” which, in a sense, is part of hard primitivism, made him more tolerant towards sensuality than towards pride. “Pride, being wholly a vice, and in every phase inexcusable, wholly betrayed and destroyed the art which was founded on it. But passion, having some root and use in healthy nature, and only becoming guilty in excess, did not altogether destroy the art founded upon it. The architecture of Palladio is wholly virtueless and despicable. Not so the Venus of Titian, nor the Antiope of Correggio” (vol. V, p.93).

(London: Phaidon Press, 2006, 159, 161)

Seen in this light, “The air of an abbess” (Elizabeth Hardwick) become even more evocative.

Daring, Fetching Reification

Describing medieval Cairo Jews’ respect for any paper with Hebrew written on it, Lothar Müller writes:

“The Geniza – a Hebrew word literally meaning “hidden,” which referred to the windowless room in a synagogue for depositing papers retired from everyday use – was not an archive, as archives involve registries as well as criteria for exclusion. And though the documents included fragments of books, book catalogs with and without price lists, and lending slips, the Geniza was even less of a book deposit or a library than it was an archive. If anything, it was more like a giant wastepaper basket where papers that had once belonged together were taken out of context and thrown into a chaos of miscellaneous sheets sharing only one abstract, general characteristic: they were covered with Hebrew characters.”

The eponymous reification refers to this pleasant absurdity, so endearing that it’s probably unintentional: retired paper. I am irrationally reminded of the blind Queen of Spades enthroned in her canopied armchair (which “seems to prefigure Magritte’s right-angled coffin for a sitting corpse,” prattles Marc Fumaroli): the Marquise du Deffand. She wrote, on a ruled desk, to Voltaire:

“And of the day’s twenty-four hours, those of one’s sleep strikes me as the happiest. You do not know, and you cannot know by yourself, the conditions of those who think, who reflect, who have some activity, and who are at the same time without talent, without passion, without occupation, without dissipation: who have had friends, who have lost them, without being able to replace them; add to this some delicacy in taste, a bit of discernment, a good deal of love of truth: cover the eyes of such people and put them in the midst of Paris, of Peking, or wherever you like, and I’ll warrant you it would be happiness for them not to have been born.”

That’s a thoroughly retired sentence, most alive precisely when (how joyful it is to speak about a sentence as if it’s a sonata) it’s closest to the grave. Although tending towards the same thought, Oblomov falls short because it swarms with furniture (they obstruficate).

What devil, what pest, what rogue this furniture is. There’s Tagore’s doubtful quip (“I don’t like your furniture poet”) and Mary McCarthy’s pre-ironed bite (“I think they become interested in décor”). Around the same time that Ursula Le Guin chuckled at Hemingway’s poor comma-free life, Calasso (who had moved on to theological metaphors since then) tried to rehabilitate some aspect of interior decoration. “Shortly before being confined and almost strangled by the short sentences that Voltaire made so popular, the honnête homme had strolled around in the empty space between two chairs…” (The Ruin of Kasch)

Given that era’s habits, the space was slender. One could even deduce that the man of taste was therefore paper-thin.

What are the humanities good for?

Non sequitur: The Oriental Institute [at Oxford] was then a notable source of spies for MI6, despite the fact that the history syllabus for the BA in Arabic ended at 1258, the year the Mongols sacked Baghdad.

Cult of the Saint

On the other side of the city [of Qufu] the tomb of Confucius is the scene of similar adoration—flowers adorn it as if he were a loved one recently lost.

Grow some sympathy. 

Debt as Substitution

Debt presupposes surplus. Calasso says, through the ghost of Brodsky, that “man has a surplus of energy which he has to dispose of. That surplus is simply life.” Not formless biological existence, but cultures and minds amenable to forces of abstraction (“shape”, “tendency”). Some of them came to believe it’s necessary to offer this surplus in some way, although they weren’t always sure about how, why, or to whom. But there are only two ways to make things disappear: killing, and eating. Even this is questionable: eating generally causes death. It is not really possible to offer this surplus, hence guilt, descending “from ritual imprecision,” because ritual is the “right moment that extends over every segment of time.” (The Ruin of Kasch, 212) So only through ritual, through the power over time which is also a submission before time, can some sort of substitute offer be drawn up and enacted. It is called sacrifice.

Here’s how this argument might appear to an American (whose knowledge has exactly the same borders as his or her work):

“If our lives are on loan, who would actually wish to repay such a debt? To live in debt is to be guilty, incomplete. But completion can only mean annihilation. In this way, the “tribute” of sacrifice could be seen as a kind of interest payment, with the life of the animal substituting temporarily for what’s really owed, which is ourselves – a mere postponement of the inevitable.” (David Graeber, Debt, discussing an early Vedic poem called the Rig Veda)

The debtor, grateful of his reprieve, wants the postponement to last for as long as possible, as those Roman slaves designated as sacrifices at their master’s funeral wished sincerely for his long and healthy life. But time is not the debtor’s friend after all, because it spawns interest – in that Platonic literalism so becoming to the Nicene fathers, St. Basil says: “day and night conspire against him.”

To conspire is to do something they shouldn’t do, perhaps dishonest, perhaps shameful. It suggests guilt. And for some reason guilt, unlike the surplus that is life, is not made to disappear. Quite the opposite: “Sacrifice is not a way to avoid guilt or to excuse guilt, it is a repetition of guilt. In a sense, it’s a reinforcement of guilt. The first guilt is the very fact of making things disappear” – in other words, it is the aftermath of a killing (“Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all,” as Simone Weil wrote in The Iliad, or the Poem of Force), a no longer violent scene that, precisely because it cannot bear witness, needs magnification if one should wish to study its meaning, which for Baudelaire was nothing less than the truth. (The Ruin of Kasch, 214)

Baudelaire, incidentally, thought the first guilt was not killing but deception: “humans deceive the gods, through substitution of the victim. The officiants deceive the victim, hiding the knife among the ears of grain because up to the end they fear he will rebel. And humans are deceived by the gods, who demand sacrifice in order to guarantee life – but then, through that act, allow death to be confirmed.” Tribute, mercy, and tyranny. Hence why today, when each person is imagined as being essentially (in all the important respects) unconnected to anyone else, we consider suicide the only acceptable form of mercy killing, while historical attitudes were the exact opposite. As the only way of completely paying back in full, suicide puts an end to future actions, including more substitution, more deception, while sacrifice is the exact opposite: “the source of all actions.” (Tiepolo Pink) Mercy issues from deception, as currency is made out of debt.

Killing, eating, disappearance, to make into a thing (Simone Weil again), substitution: these are varieties of metamorphosis, which used to be taken for granted – which is to say, time does not pass in between. But once time intervenes, what was once a basic and necessary experience turns into a pathological phenomenon, like making something out of nothing, like money spawning money. The Holy Roman Emperor’s paper money is not much more than a magic trick. Helen’s spirit is terror itself, because what is Helen but a spirit, a phantom? She is “as gold to other merchandise: gold too is merchandise, but of such a kind that it can represent all the others.” (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony) Confronted with a mirror, substitution folds up, debt is called in, and the game that had once been played out between one shape and another was now reduced to the mere alternation of appearance and disappearance. It is as in Auerbach’s retelling of Abraham’s journey, so full of chiaroscuro and dramatic gesturals: he walks in a vacuum, suppressing any sign of life in him and his followers, looking neither to the right nor to the left, (Mimesis) the most pitiful of suppliants, because he has lost the right to pity. (Weil)

One is reminded of Osip Mandelstam: “We will die in transparent Petropolis / before Persephone our queen./ With every breath we drink the air of death/ Each hour commemorates our last moments.”

Punctilio of a sensibility the most honorable

What is a polo player if not an aristocrat fused with a cowboy? And yet a ‘‘polo shirt’’ sounds somehow more approachable than a ‘‘tennis shirt,’’ probably because the equestrian game exists at such a ludicrous remove as to seem no more substantial than a mirage. The oddities attendant to the status of reappropriated symbols are delightfully rich. Ralph Lauren, born in 1939 as Ralph Lifshitz, has frequently been compelled to defend his trademark against the United States Polo Association, founded in 1890 as a sports organization. Entering the rag trade with its U.S. Polo Assn. line in 1981, the group aroused the ardent curiosity of Lauren’s legal team. Lawyers have met with limited success in arguing that polo (the institution) endeavors to ride the shirttails of Polo (the upstart) by selling shirts emblazoned with twice as many horses (and at half the price).

NYT Magazine 07/12/2015, “Unstarched Shirts”